St Bartholomew, Apostle 24th August 2014
Eucharist with hymns in The Parish Church of St James, Louth
Today we remember one of Jesus’ closest followers – known to us as Bartholomew, but quite possibly known to his friends as Nathanael. If we turn to the Gospels then we find little about him, or the reasons Jesus called him to be one of the Apostles of his teaching. In truth the sum of our knowledge from the Bible is that he is mentioned once in each of the three synoptic Gospels and Acts, and (possibly) twice in the Gospel of John. Whilst the New Testament allows us to see, with varying depths, into the characters of Peter, James and John (and indeed Thomas), there are several of the Apostles whose lives pass by with remarkably little comment in the pages of scripture.
So why do we remember someone who we know so little about?
Perhaps a little clue is given by a writer called Eusebius writing in the third century who mentions that a visitor to India found copies of Matthew’s Gospels being used by the early Christians there – who claimed that they have been given this as their holy text by the Apostle Bartholomew. This story of Bartholomew travelling to India is a key part of the stories of his life that are contained in an early mediaeval book called The Golden Legend. This book charts a series of adventures and encounters as Bartholomew took the seed of the Gospel message to various places in India – stories that echo the similar adventures of Thomas in India, and Simon and Jude as they took the Gospel to Arabia. All of this speaks both of the way in which the Christian message spread in wider than we might imagine, and in these saints we see those sent by Christ taking the seed of faith to a wider audience – well beyond the bounds of either the then Roman Empire or the traditional Christian ‘West’.
Perhaps our hesitant knowledge of the place of Bartholomew (together with Simon and Jude) in taking the Gospel to a wider audience is a result of our own place within the Church that (after some persecution) grew within the shelter of the Roman Empire. Our faith, and the documents that we see as relaying the Christian tradition are self-selecting to our own culture – and this means that we have a particular view of where we are, and how we got to where we are. The witness of these lesser celebrated Apostles is to the wider Christian Church. Their significance is that they draw us to look at the wider spread of the seed sown by Christ, and the way in which that seed has grown in the hearts of the people who continue to worship and adore the same God, revealed in the same Jesus of Nazareth.
Whilst our view of the Apostles and the message they pass on to us through the traditions of the Church is shaped by the dominance of Peter, James and (perhaps foremost) Paul – each of whom communicated Jesus’ teaching in particular ways to particular peoples. Our focus on them and their interpretation should not blind us to the presence of alternative witnesses who have equally cultivated the seed of faith in peoples and nations:
Bartholomew and Thomas, who is the focus of much of the identity of ancient Christianity in India;
Mark, who is associated with the founding of the African Church in Alexandria; and
Simon and Jude, who (since the earliest times) have been associated with the taking of the Christian message south and east from their homeland into the nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula.
The truth is that each of these Apostles is worth remembering because they took the seed of the Gospel to those they met, and in those places and with those people the seed of faith grew to reveal more about God in their lives. And so as we remember Simon and Jude today, we remember those who have lived the Christian life in Persia and Arabia – in places we now know as Iran and Iraq, Syria and Jordan, Israel and Lebanon and those earliest Christians in places such as Peshwar and Kandahar. And so we pray for those Christian communities as they continue to witness to their faith – that we might learn from the insights and perspectives of God that their traditions hold for us. And also let us pray that in us that same seed of the Gospel might dwell – that the seed of faith may grow in us; and that we might grow in our relationship with God and reveal the presence of Christ’s message in our hearts as we live it out in our daily lives.
So as we remember what the seed of the Gospel meant for those Apostles two thousand years ago, and how it shaped their daily lives in ways unimagined, perhaps we are called ever more strongly to ask of ourselves – what does the seed of the Gospel mean to us, and where might we be taken as we let the seed of faith grow in our hearts?